December 2, 2015

A European Hyperagora?

From an ancient marketplace in Athens…

A European Hyperagora?

… to a 'modern' supermarket.

A European Hyperagora - The Emergence of a European Public Sphere

  • Is the European Union a marketplace of ideas as well as only a marketplace?
  • Is there something like a European public debate?
  • Are political dialogs supranationalized?

Our Project

Case Selection: Greek Bail Outs

  • widely discussed case
  • relevant to the whole of Europe

Data Selection: Twitter Data

  • interesting webscraping experience
  • open platform: anyone in Europe can contribute to it

Research Question

What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?

  • What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?

  • What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?

Previous Research

Previous Research

Data Gathering

we pulled together a corpus of tweets

  • gathered by specifying search terms & time periods (using modified GetOldTweets)
  • adding information about the users who posted the tweets (using twitteR)
  • adding locations given by those users (using maqQuest and Google)
  • identifying language of every tweet (using textCat)
  • translating non-English tweets into English (using translateR)

Data Gathering

Findings

What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?

  • What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?

Descriptive Statistics

  • What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?

Sentiment Analysis

Main findings: Variation Across Time

Main findings: Variation Across Space

Main findings: Variation Across Space and Time

Main findings: Sentiment Analysis

Conclusions

  • quantitative methos -> limited